Where are they now? The Danbury 11 not forgotten

Ann Marie Somma

Updated 7:44 pm, Saturday, August 16, 2014

DANBURY -- On a recent sunny morning, Jose Froilan Llibisupa stood in Kennedy Park with dozens of other day laborers, eyeing construction vans and hoping to find a day's work. He had no luck and went to an Elm Street coffee shop to bide his time.

Eight years ago, on a similarly sunny morning, Llibisupa's search for work at Kennedy Park turned out far differently.

On Sept. 19, 2006, Llibisupa thought he was climbing into the van of a contractor looking for men to dismantle a fence. The contractor turned out to be an undercover Danbury cop.

Llibisupa and 10 other Ecuadorians who had taken the cop's bait were driven to a nearby parking lot, handcuffed and turned over to federal im

Llibisupa and the men could have languished for years in an immigrant detention center waiting for the government to decide whether to deport them. Instead, the sting set in motion a civil rights lawsuit against the city and federal agents that put Danbury on the map for its treatment of undocumented immigrants.

The suit was settled in 2011, with the city agreeing to pay the men $400,000 and the federal government $250,000. But by that time, two of the men had been deported and one had disappeared. The money was split among the remaining men.

"I remember," said the 40-year-old Llibisupa, a diminutive man, pointing to a spot in the triangle-shaped intersection off Main Street where the van picked him up that day.

After the raid, Llibisupa was given to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, shuttled to Hartford, and then taken to a corrections facility in Boston, where he remained in lockup until Oct. 3, 2011.

Llibisupa was lucky. Some of the other men were transferred to detention centers as far away as Texas.

Llibisupa banked his share of the settlement and built a life in his adopted city. He rents an apartment with his two brothers and still sends money home to his mother in Ecuador. He spends his free time reading law books and has acquired an interest in holistic medicine.

Looking back on the case, Wilson Hernandez, an Ecuadorian restaurant owner, still shudders at the men's arrest.

"The case was so symbolic of the abuse of power by police and politicians," Hernandez said. "They were just honest men looking for work and ended up in prison."

News of the arrests spread rapidly through the immigrant community when the men, many with wives and children in Danbury, failed to come home that night. Hernandez and local faith-based groups rallied in support of the men.

At the time of the arrests, tensions were high between City Hall and the local immigrant population. The city was dealing with a burgeoning Brazilian and Latin American community, which accused Mayor Mark Boughton of using a crackdown by police and housing inspectors to harass illegal immigrants.

At one point, city code enforcement officers shut down several backyard volleyball games popular with Ecuadorians. City officials said the games were illegal because tickets were being sold and residents were complaining about the noise.

Boughton also wanted to deputize police officers as immigration agents to crack down on illegal immigration, a stance that earned him national attention.

What happened in Danbury mirrored what was happening nationally when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents routinely conducted raids, and illegal immigrants were held in detention centers around the country in record numbers, said Wishnie.

"I believe the Danbury 11 case was part of a nationwide movement against immigrant abuses, and on a state level, it discouraged other leaders in Connecticut to pursue Boughton's anti-immigration policies," Wishnie said.

Nearly eight years later, Boughton enjoys a healthy relationship with the Ecuadorian community. He recently celebrated Ecuador's Independence Day with a flag-waving ceremony at City Hall, and the Ecuadorian Community Center named him "padrino" -- godfather -- for the day.

The city has also made inroads with day laborers. Some of them recently participated in a litter cleanup effort held by the city.

"We've moved past what happened," Boughton said. "The issue was never about immigrants. It was about illegal immigration and what we had to grapple with in Danbury."

Much has changed in Danbury since Llibisupa's arrest in 2006.

The pro- and anti-immigration demonstrations have faded. The faith-based groups who rallied around the Danbury 11 still provide outreach to the city's immigrant population, which continues to grow.

The number of day laborers looking for work near Kennedy Park, however, has dwindled. Many returned to their homelands, driven back by a sluggish economy and the lack of jobs in Connecticut and nearby New York after the recession hit.

Llibisupa still returns to Kennedy Park every workday. When the Bethel contractor who hires him to do painting jobs doesn't call, he walks to the northern end of Main Street and waits for a construction van to pick him up.